Demographic facts

Any community which debars conversion and makes heavy weather of adoption cannot survive the vagaries of time. To add fuel to the fire, it tops the list of no marriages, late marriages, no children or one child. Little wonder then that demographically we are inching ever so close to being labeled a tribe.

I am neither reformist nor orthodox. In fact, I am not qualified to pronounce any judgment on our religion or our community. That is best left to the learned priests and real scholars of Zoroastrianism. However, the demographic fact remains that Parsi Zoroastrians have little chance of survival in a community where acceptance of non-Parsis is frowned on.

Let me take you back 1,300 years when the marauding Arabs made us flee our land of origin. To save their lives, men, women and children set sail in boats and went in different directions, presumably taking the sacred fire with them. Over the years all contact with those who went to other places was lost. It is thanks to King Jadi Rana that Dastur Nariyosang Dhaval and his band of Zoroastrians who landed on Indian shores were given a home. True. But now the guesswork starts. How many landed at Sanjan? Fifty, 100, 200, 300? Take your pick, keeping in mind the size of the boats of those days and the presence of the sacred fire that the men had to protect along with the women and children.

If you say 300 (everything is hypothetical) and count 150 males, 100 females and 50 children, what was the percentage of child bearing women? It defies logic that with the hardships they experienced, there would be enough females of child bearing age to proliferate into a community of a couple of lakhs without the help of local Gujarati females.

So, it is commonsense that initially (that could be 100 years or more, your guess is as good as mine) we did mingle. Remember till the 1840s polygamy was officially allowed in our community. But even for polygamy you require women. So, the community prospered numerically by mingling alone. Of course, there is no documentation to substantiate my thinking, but then there is nothing to say that we did not mix.

The crux of this letter is to inform readers that initially it would have been impossible not to resort to mixed marriages and that the notion that our Persian blood has not been polluted through the ages is a fallacy.

Not that I advocate mixed marriages. I leave it to our learned scholars and priests in their untiring efforts to prevent future story books from starting with "once upon a time, there was a Parsi...”

ROINTON H. ANDHYARUJINA

jerhomi1@yahoo.co.in